Introduction: Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing

Leila Kassir and Richard Espley

From January to June 2018 the exhibition season Queer Between the Covers (QBTC) was held at Senate House Library, University of London. The season was based around a display of works from the library’s collections showcasing a range of LGBTQ+ literature spanning over 300 years of publishing, with a corresponding series of events. The exhibition was subtitled Literature, Queerness and the Library and at its heart it aimed to examine the diverse ways in which literature has been central to cultural understanding of queerness, and how it has been used in equal measure to both educate and to celebrate, to mock and to denounce, with works by queer writers repeatedly read not only as art but as primary data on the nature of the LGBTQ+ experience. One of the overriding aims of the exhibition was to show how it has often been between the covers of books that struggles for acceptance, liberation and repression have been waged.

Concentrating on Senate House Library’s own collections, the exhibition reflected how the library collected these works and with what emphases and omissions. What became evident as the exhibition developed was that the means of disseminating queer literature was at the heart of this story. Who published these works, how and where they were published, and for what audiences, provides an important social history of both expression and oppression, and one we decided to explore further with an exhibition-related conference entitled Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing which took place on 11 October 2018.

The call for papers suggested topics of focus including the evasion of censorship, criminal proceedings and the fear of them, histories of specific presses, cloaking and camouflage and the disguised queer story and alternative means of production and distribution such as underground presses. The ensuing conference was a lively and engaging event during which 12 papers were presented by researchers of queer book history both from within and outside of academia. One of the key aims of the conference and the entire season was to ensure participation from beyond the academy across a broad spectrum within the LGBTQ+ community (there is, of course, crossover). Five of the chapters in this book originated as papers at the Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing conference, while the chapter written by Graham McKerrow originated as a guest lecture given during the QBTC season.

One of the exhibits which formed part of the inspiration for the event was Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack, an extraordinary, bawdy exploration of a group of queer women. The book was published with great difficulty and bore false publisher information on the title page for fear of prosecution, and typified some of the issues we had suggested in the call for papers. However, while undeniably evasive, and characteristically so for Barnes, the book has also suffered from an over-identification with the Parisian salon of Natalie Clifford Barney; while clearly rooted in that community, the book’s inventiveness and fantastical elements were lost as it became reduced to nothing more than a mildly salacious portrait of identifiable figures. Similarly, the book was for decades never mentioned without it being noted that Barnes had ‘hawked’ it around the streets of Paris, creating an impression of seedy erotica sold surreptitiously to tourists, while in truth Barnes had succeeded in selling dozens of hand-coloured copies for a remarkable $50. This idiosyncratic, densely allusive, witty and boldly experimental work which had struggled to find a place in a publishing market was then marginalised by decades of persistent categorical reduction, dismissed as either masked biography printed for a small coterie defined by a narrow view of their sexuality, or borderline pornography produced solely for financial gain.

One of the pleasures of working in a great library is the ability to put these fragments of history into the hands of others, and in this case the power and brio of the work are unmistakable, and so we brought a copy of Barnes’ work in its first edition to the conference. Senate House Library is fortunate to also own a contemporary flyer that had been displayed in bookshops, undermining that image of Barnes stalking the boulevards with the entire print run under her cape. We left it on a table at the side of the room as a point of interest for speakers and delegates. As the day went on, not only did our speakers leave copies of items they were discussing alongside it, but we periodically visited the stacks to retrieve copies of other works being discussed. By the end of the day, we had an eclectic agglomeration of queer books which had chanced to be mentioned as forty people met in discussion; they were broadly bound by having queer authors, but not exclusively, and were drawn from different centuries and languages. As they were cleared away, we couldn’t help but reflect on the shifting and contingent nature of the portrait of queer culture they represented; while an accurate reflection of a day’s discussion, they were by no means a queer canon, nor is it conceivable that should another conference be organised, exactly the same works would be fetched.

This partial selection irresistibly drew to mind the events which Graham McKerrow so powerfully describes in his chapter. Operation Tiger, where British Customs and Excise raided Gay’s the Word bookshop to seek out evidence of obscenity amongst imported books, had hung over the entire exhibition season, and the conference. While the list of books confiscated was almost comically inept (the confiscation of Christine de Pizan standing out), it had been clear to us as librarians that the vast majority of the titles had been sitting on the shelves of Senate House Library at the s ame time, frequently in the same editions. Their claimed obscenity, and their queerness, manifested itself to officials in their being gathered together in Bloomsbury in a queer space, from which they then chose their own partial and inadequate selection for their own pseudo-judicial and punitive purposes. As we filled trolleys with our own selection at the end of the conference, there was an almost comical mirroring, as two groups, faced with a vast body of literature, had haphazardly amassed two selections that seemed to them obscurely to be genuinely or meaningfully queer.

At first that thought raised a wry smile, but on reflection it does speak loudly to the role of community and communities here, and how publishing interacts with the very idea of queer identities. These contingent, nourishing groupings recall what McKerrow describes as the ‘eco-system of cooperation and exchange’ which underpinned the community around Gay’s the Word bookshop, and was essential during their struggles against Customs and Excise. Indeed, those books could be viewed as fulfilling the same supportive function, or as inspiring forebears, rather as Alexandra Parsons explores in her chapter. Parsons quotes Derek Jarman reflecting on his student days at King’s College London as he ‘began to read between the lines of history. The hunt was on for forebears who validated’ his existence. Jarman’s comment about the importance of books in the understanding of queer identities corresponds with the impetus for our conference’s focus on publishing books that are both explicitly queer or, as Jarman described, the queer narrative emerged from a close reading.

Many of the chapters published here echo themes of collaboration and adaptation which, in varied forms, permeate through the works and publishing processes under consideration and reflect an important aspect of queer literature and publishing. The necessity of cooperation, either to ensure survival through strength in numbers or emotional connection, is reflected in the community-oriented works of Valerie Taylor, the subject of Jennifer Dentel’s chapter. Taylor would feature details of Chicago’s queer spaces in her novels, thus providing her readers with a ready-made, but discreetly published, map to a potential supportive network. Marketed for titillation, these works could therefore fulfil a redemptive purpose for a hidden community of readers.

Many of the works under consideration feature creative collaborations, including the dual-city publication of the probably multi-authored Teleny, the history of which is elaborated in Will Visconti’s chapter. For all of the considerable discussion of its creation, Visconti finds a collaborative community in its group of authors. Intriguingly, he also sees in the book’s structural instability and its frequent reaching out to other texts not only a community but a manifestation of the unease and uncertain status of its potential readership.

The exchange of information is sometimes reworked into adaptation of existing works, either by re-editing self-created works or by incorporating and collaging works from other sources, or in some cases via both methods. Book artist Jeremy Dixon describes his artistic process, incorporating found items in his print storytelling, while John Wieners, the poet at the heart of David Grundy’s chapter, was involved with the countercultural magazine Fag Rag, which regularly included radical reuse and collage. The process underlying Derek Jarman’s reinterpretation of his film Caravaggio into a published form is explored by Alexandra Parsons.

However, there is a limit to the extent to which such collaboration and such community can be presented purely as a redemptive force, and sometimes it is a mark of a struggle for any self-expression in the face of overwhelming odds. David Grundy powerfully describes John Wieners’ battles with his typesetters and the violent censorship and suppression of his body and mind whilst in state hospitals, and the impact these forces had on his innovative publishing practice.

Such repression recalls comments made by a delegate on the day of the conference, on the meaning and validity of the word ‘activism’ in this context, a word which recurred throughout the day to describe submerged and overt struggles for a voice. A tenet of the Queer Between the Covers season was that suppression or destruction of books was often a proxy for threatened or imagined violence towards queer bodies and lives, but we had a sobering and important discussion on the nature of the challenges which present themselves, and whether ‘activism’ in the context of publishing is a justifiable term set against those queer figures campaigning and falling victim to open brutality, imprisonment, institutionalisation or murder.

One community which is markedly absent here is representation from or discussion of trans and trans+ contributions to publishing, or intersection with publishing forms. In a collection this small, there are of course many absences, but this one was felt particularly keenly. We would like to record our regret that a contribution from Charles Ledbetter had to be withdrawn for reasons beyond all of our control. Charles’ paper and subsequent essay looked at the possibility of trans publishing as a subversive material practice, using a case study of Immanion Press, a small press whose main activity is the publication of speculative fiction foregrounding trans subject matter. We have lost an engaging and important piece on the analysis and subversion of hierarchical power relationships between publishers, authors and readers here, and we hope our readers will encounter it in another publication in due course.

As editors, we would also recognise the whiteness of the contributions both in content and authorship, something we profoundly regret, but something we want to foreground. We continue to discuss within the Library and across the University strategies to obviate a bias seen across academia, not least to work harder to diversify the channels through which we distribute calls for papers. We are also committed to introducing anonymised gathering of data on how all prospective speakers would describe their background for future conferences, as in a world of remote contact we were unaware of the whiteness of our cohort until the day of the event itself.

We are, however, delighted to be able to offer this one contingent selection of contributions to a vast conversation which is undyingly rich in its challenges and its opportunities to uplift and support, and to nourish multiple and multiplying, shifting communities. We would be delighted to see it play a small role in shaping that ongoing discussion, and perhaps helping to embed the histories of publishing more directly into the twin histories of direct homophobia, suffering and death on one hand and the love and joy of queer lives on the other.